Canadian hospitalized with new swine fluOttawa (AFP) July 3, 2012 -
A Canadian man has been hospitalized in southwestern Ontario with a new variant of the swine flu virus that caused a 2009 pandemic, a public health official announced Tuesday.

The adult male patient became ill "after close contact with pigs," Ontario's chief medical officer of health, Arlene King, said in a statement.

He is being treated for the influenza virus, which rarely spreads from animals to humans or from humans to humans, and is being closely monitored at an undisclosed hospital, she said.

No information was provided on the man's condition. But the risk of another outbreak was downplayed.

King said the case was "not an unexpected occurrence" and noted that there had been "a number of human infections with variant influenza viruses in the United States over the past year."

In 2009, an H1N1 epidemic erupted in Mexico and spread into a worldwide pandemic that caused at least 17,000 deaths.

The World Health Organisation issued a global alert on Monday for a new SARS-like respiratory virus which left a man from Qatar critically ill in a London hospital and killed at least one more in Saudi Arabia.

The 49-year-old Qatari was admitted to an intensive care unit in Doha on September 7 suffering from acute respiratory infection and kidney failure before being transferred to Britain by air ambulance on September 11, the WHO said.

A Saudi Arabian national died earlier this year from a virtually identical virus, the WHO said, while Saudi medical authorities said they were investigating other possible cases of the disease.

The WHO confirmed the illness was in the coronavirus family but was not SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which swept out of China in 2003, killing more than 800 people worldwide.

"This is a new virus," WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told AFP.

"We haven't heard of any more new cases. We don't have an appreciation of how widespread the virus is," Hartl said. "This is one reason why we're trying to get more information. We don't know how it's transmitted."

The WHO said the Qatari first fell ill on September 3 after visiting Saudi Arabia.

Britain's Health Protection Agency confirmed the presence of the new coronavirus and then found that it was a 99.5 percent match with a virus obtained from the lung tissue of a 60-year-old Saudi man who died earlier this year.

Coronaviruses are causes of the common cold but can also include more severe illnesses including SARS.

In Riyadh, the health ministry revealed that a total of three people, including the Qatari man, had been diagnosed with the virus after spending time in Saudi Arabia, according to state media. The other two later died.

The ministry said it would continue to "follow developments" linked to the disease "in coordination with international health organisations," adding that "these are rare cases and the situation is reassuring".

The announcement comes ahead of next month's annual Muslim hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia's holy city of Mecca which will attract nearly three million believers, although the WHO said it did not recommend any travel restrictions.

In Britain, the HPA, an organisation set up by the government to manage infectious diseases, meanwhile, stressed no-one else in Britain, including those who had come into contact with the man, were reporting symptoms.

The HPA said the new virus was "different from any that have previously been identified in humans."

It said there were encouraging signs that it was not as infectious as SARS as there had been no evidence of illness in people who had been in contact with the Qatari or the Saudi, including in health workers.

"Based on what we know about other coronaviruses, many of these contacts will already have passed the period when they could have caught the virus from the infected person," it said.

John Watson, head of the respiratory diseases at the HPA, said: "Immediate steps have been taken to ensure that people who have been in contact with the UK case have not been infected, and there is no evidence to suggest they have."

Peter Openshaw, director of the Centre for Respiratory Infection at Imperial College London, urged caution, saying any evidence of human-to-human transmission causing severe disease "would be very worrying".

But fellow expert John Oxford, professor at the University of London, said he was "somewhat relaxed" because he believed the illness was more likely to behave "like a nasty infection rather than join the 'exception' group like SARS."

"This new virus does not to me appear to be in the same 'big bang' group," he added. "I am very pleased that it does not!"

SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Disease), which mainly affected Asia, was recognised at the end of February 2003.

Swine flu vaccine linked to child narcolepsy: EU watchdogStockholm (AFP) Sept 21, 2012
A swine flu vaccine used in 2009-10 is linked to a higher risk of the sleeping disorder narcolepsy in children and teens in Sweden and Finland, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said Friday.
The EU agency studied the effects of the Pandemrix vaccine on children in eight European countries after Sweden and Finland reported higher incidences of narcolepsy among children wh ... read more

The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2014 - Space Media Network. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA Portal Reports are copyright European Space Agency.
All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement